Posted by jamie — 28 August 2008 at 3:26pm
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While congestion charging schemes to control
CO2 emissions from traffic are proving controversial in London
and elsewhere, there's a chance we might see some action in Brussels on this problem very soon.
In October last year, they took a personal stand to protect the environment and climbed to the top of the smokestack at Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent.
Now, the Kingsnorth Six (Ben Stewart, Emily Hall, Huw Williams, Kevin Drake, Tim Hewke and Will Rose) are being prosecuted for criminal damage.
The science of climate change is unequivocal – to avoid catastrophic impacts, industrialised countries like the UK must make steep and urgent reductions in their carbon dioxide emissions. This means that it is unacceptable to build new unabated coal-fired power stations in the UK.
This joint statement from Greenpeace, WWF, Friends of the Earth and the RSPB calls on the government to:
Posted by jamie — 21 August 2008 at 11:12am
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Slightly later than planned (blame summer holidays and technical snaffus) but in the latest edition of our podcast we take a trip to the recent Climate Camp. Somewhere in the region of two thousand people pitched up for ten days in the shadow of Kingsnorth power station in Kent, where plans to build a new coal-fired plant are afoot - with climate change in mind, this is probably not the wisest thing to do.
In between helping with activities like shifting hay bales and washing up, we talked to some of the other people from all over the country to find out what brought them to the camp. We also caught up with Dave Douglas of the National Union of Mineworkers who was there with Arthur Scargill to get involved in the debate, plus we hear from Jim Footner, one of our campaigners working on the issue, to find out why a coal-powered future is unrealistic.
Posted by jamie — 12 August 2008 at 11:51am
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In a story not as weird as the environmentally-friendly bullets one but still somewhat unnerving, it appears the US military is gunning for an increase in the amount of energy it derives from renewable sources. Military chiefs want to see 25 per cent come from the likes of wind, wave and solar by 2025 and while it accounts for 1.5 per cent of US energy consumption, the biggest impact could be the civil application for military developments in technology and efficiency so the rest of the country could be following in its khaki-coloured wake.
Not one, not two but at least three climate change-related happenings popped up around the country yesterday, many of them carried out by Climate Camp attendees. Although the camp is primarily focused on coal and the proposed new power station at Kingsnorth, today's activities also highlighted other climate threats such as aviation and biofuels. Here is just a taste of what's been happening:
"Less than a fifth of the biofuel used on UK roads meets
environmental standards intended to safeguard human rights and
guarantee carbon savings, figures released today show.
"The Renewable Fuels Agency
says just 19% of the biofuel supplied under the government's new
initiative to use biofuel to help tackle global warming met the green
standard. For the remaining 81% of the biofuel, suppliers could not say
where it came from, or could not prove that it had been produced in a
sustainable way."
But even this "green" standard is misleading, as it ignores the side-effects of biofuel production such as massive deforestation:
"The standard does not include carbon emissions from indirect effects
such as changes in land use caused by biofuel planting, which experts
have warned could cancel out their environmental benefits."
